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Comment by Arizhel | Hacker News Reader

I recommend looking for a new career path. Software is no place for introverts. You were born a few decades too late: back in the good ol' days, software was a good place for someone who liked a quiet office environment with their own office or cubicle, who'd be left alone most of the time to get their work done by themselves. Not any more. Now it's a "team sport" as 'timfrietas' says here: you're going to be in a noisy open-plan office environment with people interrupting you constantly. It's absolutely the wrong environment for an introvert. You're still a student, so you can change majors now and go into something more suitable for introverts, unlike us older guys who are now stuck. Sorry, I wish I had some more positive advice for you.

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I don't agree that "software is no place for introverts". There are definitely many software engineers out there who are introverts. You just have to find an environment and team mates that are welcoming and accept you as who you are.

Yeah, but you'll never get any peace or privacy away from them. Welcoming teammates does not make work bearable when they're on top of you all day long because of the open-plan office.

It really depends on how you go about it. Software engineers are one of the few professionals that can do well for themselves working remotely from a home office. You won't make any political progress this way, but you can be a happy code monkey. It takes some effort to find good positions that accommodate this, but they do exist.

Source: over the last 8 years, I've spent a cumulative 1 year working in an office, and the remaining 7 from home.

From everything I've seen and read, these positions are becoming more and more rare.

This is terrible advice. It may be applicable to the hipster culture in SV, but not everywhere. I'm a shy, introverted programmer but at any decent company these are not issues.

Like where? Everywhere I've seen in the US now has moved to the open-plan office. Cubicles and walled offices are a thing of the past. It's not just Silicon Valley.

My experience in the Midwest at a few small companies has been: semi-open with cubicles, shared office, or personal office.

I hope this advice is not taken seriously by anyone. There are plenty of successful introverts in software development (myself included).

Software is full of introverts, come on.

It's no place for introverts any more. It's a place for extroverts. Only extroverts perform well in an open-plan office.

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